I've documented Trump every day of his presidency — and now he's in free-fall

The president, it seems, is losing grip at the worst possible time

The president's strategies aren't working as well as they used to (Evan Vucci/AP)

No one likes a know-it-all. They have an answer for every question, no matter how ill-informed. And they’ve got just about everything figured out – even if inconvenient facts get in the way of what they’re spouting. Just ask them.

We all know the type. Every opinion is served with gusto and a side of condescension. Every sentence ends, as the American philosopher Ice Cube once put it, “with a period.”

Don’t dare question a know-it-all. But if you do, make sure you have time to endure a lengthy lecture – no, sermon – about all the reasons why it is you who is so very mistaken and ignorant.

If this personality type sounds familiar, it should. Because typically once or twice day, Donald Trump reminds us he has all the answers and has just about everything figured out.

He is, quite simply, the Know-it-All-in-Chief. But just about every poll taken of the 2020 presidential race suggests more and more Americans are simply tired of Trump’s swashbuckling act of bold pronouncements, vapid predictions and fact-ignoring decrees.

Sir, what’s your message for folks in states where coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are spiking at record paces? Like a medical prophet, he seems annoyed that anyone would worry about getting sick, saying dismissively the virus will “just go away” and that “99 percent” of Covid-19 cases are “harmless” because the national mortality rate has fallen.

The virus is not going away. Quite the opposite. But to the country’s top know-it-all, if he just keeps declaring its imminent departure, maybe – just maybe – enough folks might believe him that he can win a second term.

Mr President, what’s your message to black people who feel they have been the victims of mistreatment by police officers? Trump’s face grows red as he gestures at an interviewer while declaring those protesting inequality are “anarchists” and “thugs” and “hoodlums.”

What about opening schools in the fall, even as the Sun Belt is awash in coronavirus? “Everybody wants it. The moms want it, the dads want it, the kids want it. It’s time to do it,” Trump said on Tuesday. When you know it all, it shall be done. In your own mind, at least.

Intelligence briefings about things like Russians offering bounties to Taliban forces to kill American troops in Afghanistan? Who needs ‘em? That’s essentially this president’s view. After all, his gut knows best.

But the more Trump follows his instincts, the further he seems to fall. He has stumbled before during his term. But after watching every day of his presidency since he was sworn in on that grey day in January 2017, this correspondent sees a president in free-fall.

He has no message for voters on why they should hand him a second term. His potential legal problems mounted Thursday when the Supreme Court ruled his office does not grant him automatic immunity from a Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena seeking his tax and financial records. His poll numbers are dismal. The virus is spreading again like wildfire.

On issues from wearing masks to guard against Covid-carrying droplets ejected from our fellow humans to flying the Confederate flag to whether coronavirus is even that serious to the real state of the virus-hobbled economy, Trump’s know-it-all approach to life leaves him more and more isolated.

The optics of it all are terrible for an incumbent president battling a well-liked challenger with name recognition; not to mention an incumbent president battling a pandemic to which a majority of Americans believe he reacted slowly and poorly.

We have simply never seen this Donald Trump, so we cannot predict if he can stop his own free-fall. According to his niece, Mary Trump, he has no other modus operandi than his know-it-all way.

In her book due out next week, Mary writes that President Trump shows all the signs of having a narcissistic personality.

“The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for,” she claims.

“Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life,” she continues, apparently referring to the president’s lifestyle inside a self-made bubble, “so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”

It’s not that voters believe Biden knows more than the president. It’s that they, four months from Election Day, believe the former VP has a much firmer grasp on the real world than does Trump.